I wrote a script to check 40 domains because every good name was taken

I had the perfect name. Had it for weeks. Then I went to buy the domain and it was gone. Of course it was.

Here's the dumb thing about naming a product in 2026: the hard part isn't coming up with a name you like. It's coming up with one whose .com isn't already sitting on some parking page with a "make an offer" button.

I'd settled on a clean two-word name. Loved it. The .com? Registered. Fine, I thought, I'll just pick another good one. So I brainstormed a list — short, wordplay, the kind of names that feel like real products. Notably. Sourcely. Citely. A dozen more.

Every single one was taken. Every one.

At some point I stopped checking them one at a time in the browser like a sucker and just wrote a little script to hammer a domain registry API and print which ones were free. Fed it forty names. Watched them come back one after another: taken, taken, taken, taken. It was almost funny. Whole categories of English wiped out by squatters and dead startups from 2014.